Friday, December 16, 2016

Dear those who bravely stand still and tall to time's most awful crimes,

I shouldn’t be writing this, and this is not truly a letter anyway, but who should be reading it won’t get to read it in all cases, so I have enough courage to make it seen by, almost, everyone.

Absence is hard, the idea of getting used to someone’s presence and then being deprived of it, whether prepared or unprepared, is hard. I can’t even understand it as a concept or get some sense out of it. Absence is a lot of things, it could be death, or a break-up, or long-distance relationship, or losing your good health … even though these things don’t make sense to me either, for some reason I understand them. Maybe because I put them under the “natural reasons” kind of absence, maybe that makes them a tiny bit softer to grasp one way or the other. But “administrative detention” doesn’t, it’s horrible to swallow. This forced kind of absence. Even as a word, it’s too sophisticated to describe its ugliness. The void, the absence it leaves behind is too gruesome to be described in such nice manner.

Even the word “detention”, I mean … is the English vocabulary truly out of words to describe such heinous act but with this combination of letters? Kids get detention when they misbehave at school, we can’t use the same word to describe the action of stealing someone’s life, heart, and hope.

“Administrative Detention” is the soft political term used to describe the process of stealing everything from a human-being and giving him nothing but time and four walls of concrete. Time to read, play sports, eat or not eat, go to the bathroom, having your bones freeze out of cold and your flesh melt out of heat in a square-shaped prison cell. If you want the “political and realistic” definition for “Administrative Detention”, then google it. But it won’t even come close to describing what it really is.

I don’t even know what it really is. I only have to deal with the “best” of its consequences. I have to react to being on the outside, while the people we love are on the inside where we can’t reach them.

I won’t get into how inhumane this “detention” is, or how unfair, or how cruel, you can also google such facts that document that. But I will keep wondering and asking one thing, “What do we do?”

I don’t even know what to write, or why am I even writing, or what for. I know for sure that this is not about me, this is not about people who are “on the outside”, but still … I ask myself everyday; “What should we do?”

“What should I do?”

Demonstrations? Okay, that’ll relieve some stress. Writing letters that aren’t allowed to get through? Okay. Be around family and friends as a support system? Okay.

Then what?

At the end of the night, at early hours of the mornings, while we’re drinking our mochas and nescafes, while we’re hanging out, while we’re writing and reading, while we’re listening to our favorite music, while we're working, while we're with a family member at the hospital, while we’re dancing, or laughing, or crying … this void, this horrible, even materialistic, void won’t go away.

It’s alway there.

And nothing seems to make it go away … except for one tiny thing. One tiny good thing.

That’s hope.

Naturally it’s temporary and not as strong as it should be, yet it’s powerful enough for us on the outside and them on the inside to make it through one more day. Stephen King articulated it perfectly saying, “Remember that hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

And this trifle opportunity of immortal hope is literally all we need at this stage of absence. Knowing that inside of us we have this super powerful cliche that could never die, is exactly what we need to keep reminding ourselves that even if they chose to make time our enemy and only choice; we’re still going to make it through. Time could end, and it will. This time of absence will perish, and “presence” will become the natural state again. But until then, and even afterwards, we’ll have to keep believing that hope is truly a good thing, is truly the best of things, and it never dies.

Maybe this won’t make sense except for the few who’ve been through this forced type of absence, yet again it could make sense for any kind of absence. I don’t know … all I know is I will keep hoping for this “time” of forced absence to end.

And this will be what I hope for every second of every day.

Until one time ends and the other begins,

we will meet again.

With love,

Wa’d

PS:

“Administrative detention is a procedure that allows the Israeli military to hold prisoners indefinitely on secret information without charging them or allowing them to stand trial.”